Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Reading list

This is probably of no interest to anyone but me but in cataloging my books on LibraryThing, I have found some interesting bits tucked into old books. Just today I found several receipts, my dad's business card, W.'s kindergarten teacher's card, and most fascinating of all: the recommended summer reading lists from my high school years. I still haven't read some of the books on them and they were compiled in 86 and 87! The list for 9th and 10th grade suggests:

Act One by Moss Hart
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Marie Remarque
All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
All Things Great and Small by James Herriot
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie Jr.
Blackberry Winter by Margaret Mead
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
Burr by Gore Vidal
Canoeing With the Cree by Eric Sevareid
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Children of Sanchez by Oscar Lewis
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Forest People by Colin Turnbull
Ginats in the Earth by Ole Rolvaag
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Hannah Green
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed by Phillip Hallie
Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
1984 by George Orwell
Nobody Ever Died of Old Age by Sharon Curtin
The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler
Turning Points by Ellen Goodman
The Odyssey by Homer
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Peter the Great by Robert K. Massie
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
Rabbit Run by John Updike
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Small Is Beautiful: Economies as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
The Source by James Michener
A Time to Die by Tom Wicker
Walden II by B.F. Skinner
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner
Zelda by Nancy Milford
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

Shoo-eee. Quite the heavy-weight list there. I won't bore my three readers with listing the 11th and 12th grade list since it is longer but it is every bit as impressive and loaded with great American thinkers/writers from the end of the last century as this list. I think I used to be smarter and better read than I am now that the old memory has failed me and the brain has melted into a fluff-reading pile of marshmallow.

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